Page 78 of Lies That Blemish
What was she writing? I tried to extend my elbow, and a fresh wave of pain came over me, causing me to cry out.
Maxim peered back at me, and I gave him a little wave of apology, letting him know I was okay and hopefully keeping his attention away from Whitney.
Maxim went back to speaking to Ricov, and then Whitney stood, limping as she made her way over to me.
“Can you look at my ankle after you are done with her?” Whitney asked the medic, slipping something into my pocket.
I stayed eerily still, wanting so badly to read the note, but it wasn’t safe right now.
“Bone healer!” the female medic cried out loudly. A man who had a cut above his eyebrow ran over to me, and the female medic moved on to Whitney.
“Your elbow is broken.” The man’s accent was so thick I barely understood him.
I nodded. “Cast it. I’ll be fine.”
He shook his head. “I’ll fix.” He snapped his fingers, and a large red dragon appeared outside the blasted-open doors.
I wasn’t used to seeing so many Talanagi. They had them everywhere, and I was just now realizing it meant the Luskin people had way more powerful gifts than we did.
He was clearly a “bone healer,” which was so incredibly rare in Amersea. But people here didn’t seem fazed by it.
He guided me outside, and when I got within ten feet of Maxim, he broke away from the people he’d been talking to and came to stand at my side. “Don’t want you getting lost, little pet,” he told me with a grin.
I wondered if there was a physical proximity element to his magic, but my thoughts didn’t linger there too long.
I watched as the bone healer and his accompanying dragon creature healed my wound and noted it was very similar to Valor’s magic.
When he was done, he left, and then Maxim was there staring at the giant hole in the earth, far more destruction than anything I’d ever seen.
He turned to face me with absolute glee on his face. “With this, I can conquer not only Amersea but Imbria too.”
My greatest fear was that one day Luska would rule the world. And he was right: with this, he could.
“Let’s get home. We have a wedding to attend tomorrow,” Maxim told me and then began to walk. My legs moved against my will to follow him.
A wedding. Tomorrow. To Maxim Vlek. I could think of nothing worse.
Chapter 26
Valor
I had a new motto.What would Aisling do?It was how I was handling everything so fast. I’d convinced the admirals to allow my plan to detonate a bomb over the Luskin army base off their west coast. We’d spent all day and night evacuating our people. They took trains and cars and crossed into the Wilds on foot, into the barren, burned-out lands of Imbria—all evidence of the destruction we’d caused.
When they questioned why in the world they would go into enemy territory, I decided to steer from theWhat Would Aisling Do?territory and did what Valor would do. I told them the truth about Father—that we’d recently found out he was behind the attack that caused the Great Blackout and that the Imbrians were, in fact, our allies; Luska had a bomb that could level Riverine, and we needed to get out now and ask questions later. I told them that my sisters and I were different from our father; we would never turn on our own people, and deciding to tell the truth was evidence that we wanted things to run differently this time.
Some hesitated at my confession, but most people packed up and left with a simple three-day pack because we all knew that if Luska did have something that could take out Riverine, they would. My head was still firmly attached to my shoulders, so I was counting that as a win.
Some chose to stay at their own peril. People asked where my sister was, and again, I was honest in telling them Victory had been kidnapped and I was interim empress until Aisling returned with her on a rescue mission. It was a glorified truth, one I hoped was real and would end with both of my sisters alive and back home.
The good thing about gossip was that when you wanted something to spread like wildfire, it did. By the time I reached Evergreen, people were already on the move to Imbria and had heard the worst of the news. I overheard one family saying they always knew Father was a rotten liar and suspected him of dark deeds but thought Aisling and my sisters would turn the empire around. That was a relief. The risk of outing what my father did was a great danger to my sisters and me. But I wasn’t sure how to get them to trust Kohen and Imbria otherwise, and to be honest, I couldn’t sleep another day with the injustice of Ravi Badshah going down for something Father did. If the empire fell because of it, then so be it.
It was four in the morning by the time I made it back to the willow tree house I once shared with my sisters. Kohen was with me; half a dozen Fleet members patrolled outside. I had to meet Charlene and the other Talanagi bonded in about four hours in Emberlane Park to go over the plan and decide exactly how we would pull it off. Meanwhile, the admirals were having a bomb made with as many explosives as we had on hand in Riverine. Tetra had taken some time to get her mom to safety and was meeting me at the park in the morning. Liana had helped allnight to ferry over people in need and promised to also meet in the park in the morning.
“You can sleep in my sister’s room,” I told Kohen and pointed to the door. He peered at the closed door with apprehension. “I’ll just take the couch,” he said.
I frowned. “Aisling won’t care. And trust me, her bed is much better than that couch.” If they were married, why was he being shy about sleeping in her bed?
Kohen swallowed hard. “Valor, if I smell her on that pillow, I’ll never sleep.”
